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Plan a Successful Promotional Event

September 11, 2014

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By: Romeo Demes

Social Marketing Strategist

Artonery

The goal of promotions of any kind is to create brand awareness and reach out to as many potential customers as possible. Promotion and marketing involves a lot of activities and strategies. You could already be running your online marketing campaign and spending money on search engine optimization. However, offline or conventional marketing methodologies like hosting, sponsoring, and involving yourself in community activities are still some of the best ways to acquire more clients/customers.

- Community involvement Vs Own events

If you want to promote your business and reach out to a lot of potential customers you could either host your own event or you could just stand on the side lines and sponsor or assist a local community event. The tips further discussed below will help you get prepared for both the kind of events. If you have no experience in hosting your own event, you should probably just support/sponsor a local event with the right kind of audience to test the waters. If you have the investment, plan, and right resources to run your own event you could run your own. However, supporting local events could be the right thing if this is all new to you.

- Online promotion

A lot of people think that online marketing and offline marketing are rivals. There are many business owners who are under a misapprehension that online marketing is all they have to concentrate and invest in to reach out to potential customers. The fact is that, both online marketing and offline marketing should work with one another. While planning your event, you will also plan out a strategy to promote in social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. You should spread the news online that more people get to know about it. You can provide a unique Twitter and Facebook hash tag (#) for people to discuss about it and mention about it in their status updates and get more exposure. This # tag and web page address about the event could be printed on offline promotional items like flyers, catalogues, pull up banners, etc. You could also run an e-mail campaign to send out news about the event to all the people who could be interested.

- Worthy partners

Teaming up with the right partners can bring more audience to your event. For instance, you can partner with a non-profit organization and support them to get new guests. By partnering with a non-profit you are also sending out the right message to the people who are attending the event.

- Pick the right audience

Picking the right audience for the event you are hosting or picking the right event to sponsor is very crucial. If you run a book store in town, it would be logical to sponsor the local football match. Write down a brief description about your ideal target audience. This profile will help you to cherry pick the perfect audiences for you event. The better you target, higher conversion rate will be. Once you have sketched the profile of your ideal potential prospect, you can research further to discover them.

This is a no-brainer. You have to pass out free merchandises with your branding or message to everyone who will be attending the event or trade show. Things like calendars, pens, scribbling pads etc. could be given. The point of giving out free merchandises is to make them use these things as often and as long as possible and incept your brand in their mind. For instance, a well-designed and creative calendar could be hanging on the wall of your client’s office for a year. You don’t just have to stick to conventional promotional items. The souvenir doesn’t always have to be tangible. You can send free useful e-books to the attendees after the event is over. Also, giving away targeted items could be a good idea rather than giving away generic items. It could be a good idea to give away free leashes, grooming brushes, or portable bowls if there is a gathering of pet owners rather than giving away pens.